2013 Challenges, Books

Book 195: Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World – Sharon Waxma

Sorry for the long post in advance, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a book about museums and antiquities and I forgot how much I love them and how much they make me think!

This book has been on my to-be-read shelf since July of 2011 and I can’t believe I waited this long to read it! I will never forget my first Anthropology class in undergrad and the professor going off on a tangent about the looting of the museums after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It pretty much guaranteed I would be an Anthropology major. (I later switched to cultural anthropology and focused on gender in the media, but still the people were awesome!) The intrigue, the drama, the affairs and the crimes, it could be a spy novel if it were fiction and not fact! This book will count as a bonus book for my 2013 Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

Click here to continue reading.

Updates

April 2013 Recap

What a month. I can’t believe how fast the month has gone and things were definitely not boring here in Boston with the marathon bombings and ensuing chaos. I’m glad to see the month go, but not ready for May or the summer that follows shortly after.

April felt like a short month for reading, but I actually read an above average six books: one for book group, three challenge books (two pre-listed one additional) and two ‘trashy romance’ novels/galleys. (I don’t really think they’re trashy, well some are and some I read are, but I just love to call them that.)

Recent Acquisitions

Well I was doing really good about not buying books and then in the last week of the month all of a sudden I bought three books and downloaded two galleys (one of which I completed); story of my life right? I  bought one kindle book for $1 (it sounded too good not to buy) called No Strings by Nick Nolan which I’m excited about. In addition I bought two physical books, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, Peark and Sir Orfeo translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, above left, which I saw on someone else’s blog and I wanted a copy; and I purchased a copy of Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, above right, for my May Books into Movies book group.

Click here to continue reading.

Updates

Lunch Break Interlude IV

Lucky you, fellow bloggers, two Lunch Break Interlude posts within a two-week span!  The writing bug has clearly infested my brain, as by the time this posts I will have pre-scheduled three weeks of consecutive posts, dating all the way back to my first piece about Anne Brontë!

Mother’s Day weekend I went over to Harvard to get my haircut and once again couldn’t escape the lure of Harvard Bookstore. I stopped in afterward and got these two lovely books! Annabel by Kathleen Winter is on my long to-be-read list from when I saw it in Harvard Book Store over a year ago and The Ghost Road by Pat Barker is a Man-Booker Prize winning novel and I’m slowly working my way through all those winners as well. The only downside was that The Ghost Road is the third book in a trilogy and the other two books in the trilogy, even though they were used, were more expensive so I didn’t grab them, but that means I’ll be supporting my local library!

Click here to continue reading.